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Creating Innovators: Why America's Education System Is Obsolete

America’s last competitive advantage — its ability to innovate — is at risk as a result of the country’s lackluster education system, according to research by Harvard Innovation Education Fellow Tony Wagner.

American schools educate to fill children with knowledge — instead they should be focusing on developing students’ innovation skills and motivation to succeed, he says:

“Today knowledge is ubiquitous, constantly changing, growing exponentially… Today knowledge is free. It’s like air, it’s like water. It’s become a commodity… There’s no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn’t care what you know. What the world cares about is what you can do with what you know.”

Knowledge that children are encouraged to soak up in American schools — the memorization of planets, state capitals, the Periodic Table of Elements — can only take students so far. But “skill and will” determine a child’s ability to think outside of the box, he says.

Over two year of research involving interviews with executives, college teachers, community leaders, and recent graduates, Wagner defined the skills needed for Americans to stay competitive in an increasingly globalized workforce. As lined out in his book, “The Global Achievement Gap,” that set of core competencies that every student must master before the end of high school is:

- Critical thinking and problem solving (the ability to ask the right questions)

“We’ve created an economy based on people spending money they do not have to buy things they may not need, threatening the planet in the process,” he says. “We have to transition from a consumer-driven economy to an innovation-driven economy.”

In an effort to discern teaching and parenting patterns, Wagner interviewed innovators in their 20s, followed by interviews with their parents and the influential teachers and mentors in the students’ lives. He found stunning similarities between the teaching styles and goals he encountered with these influential teachers at all levels of education and concludes, “The culture of schooling as we all know it is radically at odds with the culture of learning that produces innovators.” He identified five ways in which America’s education system is stunting innovation:

1. Individual achievement is the focus: Students spend a bulk of their time focusing on improving their GPAs — school is a competition among peers. “But innovation is a team sport,” says Wagner. “Yes, it requires some solitude and reflection, but fundamentally problems are too complex to innovate or solve by oneself.”

2. Specialization is celebrated and rewarded: High school curriculum is structured using Carnegie units, a system that is 125 years old, says Wagner. He says the director of talent at Google once told him, “If there’s one thing that educators need to understand, it’s that you can neither understand nor solve problems within the context and bright lines of subject content.” Wagner declares, “Learning to be an innovator is about learning to cross disciplinary boundaries and exploring problems and their solutions from multiple perspectives.”

3. Risk aversion is the norm: “We penalize mistakes,” says Wagner. “The whole challenge in schooling is to figure out what the teacher wants. And the teachers have to figure out what the superintendent wants or the state wants. It’s a compliance-driven, risk-averse culture.” Innovation, on the other hand, is grounded in taking risks and learning via trial and error. Educators could take a note from design firm IDEO with its mantra of “Fail early, fail often,” says Wagner. And at Stanford’s Institute of Design, he says they are considering ideas like, “We’re thinking F is the new A.” Without failure, there is no innovation.

4. Learning is profoundly passive: For 12 to 16 years, we learn to consume information while in school, says Wagner. He suspects that our schooling culture has actually turned us into the “good little consumers” that we are. Innovative learning cultures teach about creating, not consuming, he says.

5. Extrinsic incentives drive learning: “Carrots and sticks, As and Fs,” Wagner remarks. Young innovators are intrinsically motivated, he says. They aren’t interested in grading scales and petty reward systems. Parents and teachers can encourage innovative thinking by nurturing the curiosity and inquisitiveness of young people, Wagner says. As he describes it, it’s a pattern of “play to passion to purpose.” Parents of innovators encouraged their children to play in more exploratory ways, he says. “Fewer toys, more toys without batteries, more unstructured time in their day.” Those children grow up to find passions, not just academic achievement, he says. “And that passion matures to a profound sense of purpose. Every young person I interviewed wants to make a difference in the world, put a ding in the universe.”

“”We have to transition to an innovation-driven culture, an innovation-driven society,” says Wagner. “A consumer society is bankrupt — it’s not coming back. To do that, we’re going to have to work with young people — as parents, as teachers, as mentors, and as employers — in very different ways. They want to, you want to become innovators. And we as a country need the capacity to solve more different kinds of problems in more ways. It requires us to have a very different vision of education, of teaching and learning for the 21st century. It requires us to have a sense of urgency about the problem that needs to be solved.”

Wagner is not suggesting we change a few processes and update a few manuals. He says, “The system has become obsolete. It needs reinventing, not reforming.”

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Everyone here is missing a very important point. The public education system was never about creating innovators; it was about instilling community values while providing basic skills necessary to get and hold a job. This is why we teach mythology rather than history, and enforce “go along to get along” principles.

A large percentage of parents would be horrified if their children came home questioning the parents’ fundamental beliefs (I personally went through this in the ’60s, even though my parents were both college-educated); “critical thinking” is deliberately suppressed in schools.

A not-insignificant segment of the population simply don’t want their children to think differently than they do – witness specialty educational institutions like Oral Roberts University, and special camps. In the ’70s, some parents sued to have certain books removed from the high-school curriculum because they encouraged children to use their imagination, and “The Wizard of Oz” because it maintained there was such a thing as a good witch. The Texas Textbook controversy has been raging for decades – watering down what’s taught to avoid offending the most conservative of parents – and every day brings new attempts by the medievalists to prevent teaching science (particularly evolution and climate change), state by state.

On top of this, we layer a bureaucracy which includes weak teacher qualifications and low wages, poor allocation of funds, negative incentives for creative teaching, “publish or perish” (emphasis on competitive exam results, and “one right answer”), and penalties for out-of-band performance.

The result is that affluent parents or parents of bright kids, committed to their children being well-educated and creative, upgrade their schools or at least insure their children get expanded horizons; the rest just suffer.

“Information” vs. “creative thinking” is a false dichotomy. There’s no such thing as knowing too much; the amount taught in the basic curriculum is well below the average student’s ability to absorb information. If you don’t know anything, you have nothing to work with; the missing piece is knowing what to do with information – how to evaluate both its veracity and usefulness.

So the author is correct that the system needs to be reinvented, but he’s missing a few points. The most fundamental problem with his thesis is that reinventing the educational system requires both fundamental social change and firing at least half the teachers (and finding competent replacements). Think the Teachers Union will like that one? Think the Tea Party and Limbaugh sycophants will buy a massive transfer to “liberal values”?

hi Erica: great article. We definitely need to revamp US education system to produce next-gen innovators who can tackle big socio-economic problems in America. The 20th century innovators worked in big R&D labs (think Thomas Edison (GE) and Thomas Watson (IBM)). But in 21st century, with the advent of social media, innovation is becoming more open and democratic. It’s time we move innovation out of the R&D lab and into the street. The way to do that by seeking inspiration from emerging markets like India, China, Africa, Brazil where grassroots entrepreneurs are tackling big problems like healthcare, energy, education, and financial inclusion using very limited resources. They use JUGAAD — a frugal and flexible approach to innovate faster, better, and cheaper. In my latest book JUGAAD INNOVATION, we offer a roadmap for how the American society can train its next-gen innovators to think and act frugally and flexibly. We show how Stanford and Santa Clara University as well as grassroots organizations like Design for America are training young Americans to be resourceful and creative in the face of adversity and scarcity. Check it out: www.jugaadinnovation.com

As a teacher, the GOP has done more to sabotage America’s schools and our ability to compete worldwide, than any group of international terrorists. Mandatory testing has caused educators to abandon teaching kids how to think and instead concentrate on taking multiple guess tests. This has killed creativity. The GOP’s tax cut/penny pinching means our schools don’t have money for basic maintenance, libraries lack books, schools lack supplies, wages are so low-young teachers quit and take other jobs, programs like art, music and higher math get cancelled, scholarships to colleges are underfunded, and L/D programs become meaningless. The Republican’s war on the Department of Education and teachers union is nothing short of Class Warfare! Trickle down economics is war on America’s Families by the rich. In the end however, all things Republican con volute on themselves: Business can’t get enough engineers or scientists and the nation’s economy decays. Let’s toss the GOP and Tea Party out in November!

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I think a big pop on FB may not happen. With all said the retail investor has no control or really for that matter a good guage of this stock. Even seasoned swing traders are going to have a hard time. However, if we look at this on a comparative basis and try to figure this out there are a few things that may weigh on this stock.

1) The float is not going to be thin. If it is at 10.6 billion dollars, that will be among the highest amount of stock sold in US history.

2) This stock creates some issues for some of the larger funds in like the teacher fund in California. The largest problem with this is the control of Mark Zuckerberg and the large investors will have no representation in the running of the company. While other companies have this structure, at the ipo FB will a blue chip. Many ofsome very large funds may stay away from this stock. Some may stay away just because there is no female representation on the board but for the most part it will be due the control Mr Zuckerberg wields.

I think the valuation will not be as big of an issue for funds. Most of the funds such as Fidelity’s etc. are going to use FB as a Marquee stock in their funds. The very last question will be how much? Are they going to just a small amount to say, “Hey weve got FB” or are they going to say lets load up because we believe that FB is going to grow its price per share. I think it will be the first.

FB through the investment banks has probably found its ipo price based on commitment levels of institutional investors. As far as the rise, it will be hard to determine at this point.

One thing that most people will not understand is that this stock will have a sky high beta. There are so many people on each side of the bear/bull camp. The shares are not thin so both longs and the shorts will have their day. The small swing trader as usual will most likely take it in the shorts. It is too bad that there are not options available to the normal market because the play on implied volatility could be amazing.

I am not any better than anyone else but if I had a guess I would say that this issue will not get a huge pop (No doubling ala Grasso’s comments on CNBC). I would guess that it will get about 5% to 10% pop after the ipo. There will be some spikes in the after hours trading. It will swing up in the morning of the next trading day and right as soon as those who are looking for a huge pop there will be a sell off. The stock will establish supports around caps of 75B and 100B. The stock will trade outside those ranges however until the next report those will be trading ranges.

I am not doing this because I know it just is based on other stocks and my guess is that only the market maker knows. I wont trade this as this will be a loser for most traders. I may trade option iv if there is still a lot around the middle to late summer.

Very nice read! and very true indeed! I was a top student for most of my life, but then I figured that there’s a better way to get out of the normal pattern of go to school and work for the rest of your life. Become an entrepreneur it is a hard way to follow, but I learned a lot more outside of school, than I ever did my whole life in it. I still have not achieved the income stability or security but I was never taught about it and I am learning as I go. Will I go back to school? Probably, when I finish paying my other loans… Thanks for the article!

This article is complete hooey. American schools ONLY teach innovation. It is the heart and soul of post-modernism. The problem is that students no longer learn enough about the world to think their way out of paper bag. In our post-modern school system innovation trumps truth 99 times out of 100. The problem with American students is that their innovation is not constrained by any notion of objective truth. They imagine that if they want green energy bad enough it will materialize, physics be damned. It is the sinister denial of objective reality, and the value of understanding constraints which leads them all to believe in a free lunch. Foucauldian transgressionism worships innovation at its center, but it has no social merit, because it ultimately exists only in academic fantasy. And anyone who buys into it cannot positively contribute to a society that exists in reality. It is true that knowledge is widely available, and yet fewer and fewer seem to have any mastery of that knowledge. The real problem is that academic credentials are no longer a guarantee of knowledge mastery. No employer would select the candidate who didn’t know anything, but was “really good at innovating”.